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Opinion Contributor

Why Texas still needs the Voting Rights Act

Texas has been up to the same old tricks, the author writes. | AP Photo

By TREY MARTINEZ FISCHER | 2/27/13 4:41 AM EST

Ninety-eight to nothing, and 390-33. With margins like these, you’d think they were naming a post office. But instead Congress was reaffirming one of the country’s most important civil rights laws.

In 2006, the House and Senate, by a landslide, reauthorized the seminal Voting Rights Act (VRA) for another 25 years, and President George W. Bush signed the bill into law. On Wednesday, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the validity of Section 5 of that law, which protects minorities’ voting rights by requiring certain states and counties to receive federal clearance if they want to change their voting laws.

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As chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus and a Texas state representative, I am part of a similar voting rights case in Texas, put on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County: last August, a three-judge federal court in Washington ruled that the 2011 Texas voter ID law was discriminatory and had violated Section 5. That law would have required most Texas voters to use a Department of Public Safety (DPS) issued ID – even though 795,000 registered voters in Texas lacked the mandated ID, and one-third of Texas’ counties have no DPS office for Texans to comply with the law. A license to carry a concealed handgun would have counted, but a student or government worker ID would not have.

“Things have changed in the South,” Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in a 2009 case that many feared would invalidate Section 5. But the necessity for the VRA has only grown in recent years, and all the more in my home state thanks to discriminatory attempts at redistricting and what amounts to a 21st-century poll tax.

Two years ago, Republicans in the state legislature tried to wipe out a state House district in Houston that had a 61 percent minority population and carve it up to distribute minority voters among predominantly white areas. Ten years before that, when I first ran for the state House, the legislature attempted to merge two majority-minority districts in San Antonio, which would not only have reduced Latinos’ power in Austin, it would also have forced me to run against one of my elementary school classmates.

The 2011 voter ID law would have prevented one of my constituents, college student Victoria Rodriguez, from voting, since for her, getting a driver’s license or birth certificate from the state would have incurred too large a cost. Similarly, those living in rural communities may have to travel long distances to reach a DPS office. The voter ID would have muffled the voice of those that need government’s ear the most – Latinos, African Americans, the poor and the elderly.

While Texas has been up to the same old tricks, thankfully, our lawmakers in Washington have had the sense to maintain laws that make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity at the voting booth.